For Minnesota Music Month, The Current polled local music fans for April’s edition of The Scouting Report. A total of 245 people filled out this year’s Minnesota Music Month Scouting Report ballot, and 455 unique artists were chosen overall. The top 10 artists who received the most support include Halfway Down.

Blake Deneweth and Shawn Kraft sit close together, finishing each other’s thoughts. This is how St. Paul pop-punk band Halfway Down operates: collaborative, conversational, and just a little bit chaotic in the best way. Deneweth, Kraft, and drummer Cameron Kraft — who is Shawn’s brother — form the core of a band that didn’t emerge from a grand plan but rather from a moment of recognition. One of them had ideas. Another recognized their potential. The rest followed.

“It wasn’t really complicated,” Shawn explains. “I was in another band that didn’t have direction. Deneweth showed up to a vocal tryout, and we immediately saw something in him.” The band’s leader at the time didn’t agree, but that friction ended up creating something new. Shawn and the bassist broke off, drawn by what Deneweth brought to the table: clarity, ambition, and a backlog of ideas that had been sitting quietly on a computer for years.

For Deneweth, that moment marked a shift. After a decade of writing music privately — “from 20 to 30,” he says — he had only recently started uploading demos to Spotify. Encouragement from his younger brother gave him the push he needed. By the time he met Shawn, hesitation had given way to urgency. “I was just like, here’s everything,” Deneweth says. “Let’s turn it into something.”

That openness became the band’s foundation. Their songwriting process still begins with fragments — often Deneweth’s rough, punk-leaning ideas — before Shawn reshapes them, adding structure, refining transitions, and building out the emotional arc. “He’s got a clearer vision of how to tie things together,” Deneweth admits. “I’m more… gritty.”

The result is a sound that exists somewhere between raw and polished, nostalgic and current. They describe it as falling along a line from Blink-182 to A Day to Remember, though their influences stretch deeper into the mid-2000s scene: bands like Four Year Strong, Chiodos, and the Devil Wears Prada. It’s a sound that was prevalent during the height of Warped Tour days, but still has a deep, dense following.

“The motto since the beginning,” Deneweth says, “is we make music we want to hear.”

That philosophy extends to how they release it. Rather than building toward a traditional album, Halfway Down has focused on a steady stream of singles — six a year, if they can manage it. Each one, they say, captures a moment in time. “Our tastes change, our lives change,” Shawn explains. “Every single is like a snapshot of where we were.”

Sometimes that means revisiting old ideas with a new perspective. A demo that once didn’t land can become something meaningful later, reshaped by experience. Other times, it means writing in the moment, chasing whatever feeling happens to be strongest that week — whether it’s a breakup ballad or a bright, unexpected love song.

Their upcoming releases reflect that duality. One track, written entirely by Shawn, leans introspective and melancholic. The other, led by Deneweth, is lighter, almost celebratory. “It’s like yin and yang,” Shawn says. “Two completely different moods.”

Even their production process mirrors that balance between control and collaboration. Demos are passed back and forth, rebuilt from scratch, layered carefully before being handed off to their producer. Features — often sourced through something as casual as an Instagram message — are given both direction and freedom. “We want people to bring their own flair,” Deneweth says. “That’s the fun part.”

On record, the result is dense and expansive, filled with stacked harmonies and layered instrumentation. Recreating that live requires compromise. The band runs backing tracks to fill in the gaps — bass lines, extra guitar parts, orchestral elements — while their drummer anchors everything with in-ear monitors. It’s a precise system, one that leaves little room for improvisation but allows them to deliver the fullness of their recordings on stage.

And the stage, for all its early uncertainty, has become central to who they are.

Their first show, at a small Minneapolis venue, was a lesson in improvisation. They didn’t know how to soundcheck. They weren’t entirely sure where to set up. At one point, their backing tracks failed altogether. “We just kind of looked at the sound guy like, what do we do?” Shawn recalls, laughing.

But they made it through. And more importantly, they kept going.

“It took time,” Deneweth says. “A lot of time.” Their first year, he describes as an “identity crisis” — not musically, but socially. They didn’t know where they fit in the local scene, or even how to navigate it. They went to shows, introduced themselves, built relationships within the community slowly. Now, three years in, they’ve carved out a space that feels distinctly their own.

Part of that identity comes from contrast. In a scene that often leans DIY and rough around the edges, Halfway Down’s polished production stands out, but so does their approachability. Offstage, they make a point of being present — talking to fans, watching other bands, staying for the full show. It’s a small thing, but one they believe matters.

“We’re all here for the same reason,” Shawn says. “Why not support each other?”

That sense of community is also what sustains them in an industry that, financially at least, offers little immediate reward. Streaming revenue barely covers the cost of a single song. The market is saturated. Visibility is hard-won. Still, they see the accessibility of modern music-making as both a gift and a challenge.

“I wouldn’t be doing this without it,” Deneweth admits. “But yeah, it makes everything more crowded.”

Even so, their ambitions remain deliberately grounded. There’s no fixation on fame, no grand narrative about breaking through. Instead, their goals are incremental, almost modest by design: release the next song, play the next show, build something sustainable.

“If we make it through the year, that’s a win,” Shawn says.

Ask them about legacy, though, and the answer shifts — not toward scale, but toward impact. They want to be known as a band that works hard, that delivers on stage, that treats people well. A band that doesn’t take itself too seriously, even while taking the music seriously enough to matter.

Beneath it all, there’s something more personal driving the work. The name Halfway Down —taken from a poem from an episode of Bojack Horseman is about regret and realization — hints at it. Their songs often wrestle with anxiety, memory, and emotional weight, the kind of things, they point out, their generation wasn’t always encouraged to confront openly.

“It’s therapy,” Deneweth says, simply. “We are writing music for a generation, for people especially in their mid-30s or 40s, when therapy wasn't really a thing. We want to find a way to help people process their emotions.”

Shawn adds, “I think we have a pretty special sound that's we're feeling a spot that's kind of not really occupied in our scene, so that’s a reason to pay attention to what we’re doing.”

If there’s a reason to pay attention, it’s there: in the honesty, in the effort, in the quiet insistence on making something meaningful even when the path forward isn’t entirely clear.

Related: Minnesota Music Month Scouting Report 2026: The top 10 new local artists